[TUHS] Re: Documenting a set of functions with -man

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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[looping the groff list back in; Doug's reply went to TUHS]

At 2024-06-25T08:51:39-0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> > The lack of a monospaced font is, I suspect, due either to
> > physical limitations of the C/A/T phototypesetter[1] or fiscal
> > limitations--no budget in that department to buy photographic
> > plates for Courier.
> 
> Since the C/A/T held only four fonts, there was no room for
> Courier.

The TUHS list is a good place to solicit recollections about the CAT-4
and CAT-8 models.  I surmise (mostly based on some Henry Spencer
"cat2dit" code that I cannot now lay my hands on) that the model numbers
indicated the number of mounting positions in the font plate carousel.

Does anyone have any recollections of dealing with the CAT-8?

I had assumed that Kernighan & Ritchie got their hands on a CAT-8 during
the course of preparing _The C Programming Language_ (1978), since it
exhibited use of Courier (upright, normal weight only) alongside Times:
roman and italic, and, for headings, bold.

Looking over the pages of the book now, though, it occurs to me that
K&R might have managed to set it with a CAT-4 by eschewing the special
font S, using Courier roman in its place.  A glance over a few dozen
pages does not reveal to me any of the unique symbols from the special
font, not even ASCII characters that GSI's Times roman lacked.[1][2]
Everywhere a double-quote ", backslash \, or underscore _ is required,
it's monospaced.[3]

...but wait.  On page 210 I see a times sign.  ("If E is an
n-dimensional array of rank i×j× ··· ×k, then E appearing in an
expression is coverted to a pointer to an (n−1)-dimensional array with
rank j× ··· ×k.")  Moreover, the capital "E" is in Courier roman.  The
section sign § also appears on the same page.

So maybe they had access to a CAT-8 after all, and used a whopping 5
different font plates.  Or they used a CAT-4 and had to compose many
pages in two passes.  That would have been mightily tedious.

> But when we moved beyond that typesetter, inertia kept the old ways.
> Finally, in v9, I introduced the fixed-width "literal font", L, in
> -man and said goodbye to boldface in synopses. By then, though,
> Research Unix  was merely a local branch of the Unix evolutionary
> tree, so the literal-font gene never spread.

Regards,
Branden

[1] The groff_char(7) man page in groff 1.23.0 lists the glyph
    repertoires of the GSI fonts for the convenience of those who don't
    have a scan of CSTR #54 (1976) handy.  The Bell System logo is
    missing, though.

[2] Some interesting symbols appear on page 18.  But as noted in the
    text, these can be constructed via overstriking.  :)

[3] The "double-quotes" appearing in Times in the book are obviously
    repetitions of the single typesetter's quotes that the GSI Times
    roman font had; you can see that they are not closely kerned.  One
    can infer ``this input''.

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